At a community meeting a few days ago, the question of alcohol consumption came up (as it frequently does in our adjacent-to-a-university neighborhood). One young man complained that when local bars (where over-serving is -- in theory -- proscribed) shut down, the students then take their drinking to "house parties" where there is no adult present to oversee how much can be consumed. "They just go and get themselves totally wasted," said the student. Our local police sergeant challenged him. "What do you do," she asked, "when your friends make plans to get drunk? Do you try to stop them?" Her question took the student aback. I don't think that the idea that someone his age could or should intervene had occurred to him until that moment.
I was surprised that the sergeant asked the young man to look after his friends. It was as though she asked him to become that dreaded folk-figure, the busybody.
What are the rules in such cases? Isn't the notion that each person is responsible for only his own welfare a contemporary American dogma? "You can't help people; they have to help themselves."
Some score or so years ago, I had a friend (I'll call him Vincent) who was a two-(or three) pack-a-day smoker. He was an intimate enough friend that I crossed the invisible busybody barrier. I'd argue with him about the health risks of using tobacco; I'd send him articles to read. He was not impressed or persuaded, but he was often irritated. Once he said, scornfully, "you are trying to be your brother's keeper." Vincent was angry when I asked him not to smoke when he visited my house. His conviction was that when you have a friend, you don't try to change him or to regulate his habits; you accept him with all his foibles. Perhaps he was right, but nevertheless, for several years I didn't invite him home, which was a great loss, because he was smart and informed and charming and sociable.
Then came the lung cancer, the surgery, the chemo, the false remissions, the swings between hope and despair, and eventually, the premature death. In an interview in the local newspaper a few weeks before he died, Vincent said, "I have simply lost twenty years of my life to smoking." To me he said, once, very quietly, "you were right." Did he mean, "you were right that smoking was dangerous," or did he mean, "you were right to try to change me?" I don't know.
I may have been right, but what good did I do? I alienated a friend and I didn't add a day to his life.
When I look back now after so many years have passed, my regret is not that I intervened but that intervened so ineffectively. It haunts me that I didn't I do a better job.
In our neighborhood, we lose a local student to alcohol poisoning each and every year. Can there be a sadder or more useless death? Mom and dad nurture a child for eighteen years, send him or her off to college, and a week later receive a phone call that their child has choked to death on his own vomit.
Who is the responsible party? Friends, teachers, police, family, liquor-purveyors? Or only the individual?
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